We got together on a rainy evening and packed what seemed like several hundred people into the second floor of Johnny Brenda’s in the Fishtown district of Philadelphia and got this party started. The bar, the stage, the classy photo booth, and the cool people-who even accepted me despite being much overdressed in my tuxedo.

I was auctioned with J. Kyle Keener (who is an accomplished photographer in his own rite) in the photographer master class. The person who “bought” us would get a class with each of us. Kyle is quite the hilarious guy and we planned a stupid fun entrance to the stage which included me setting up additional lights and making a commotion and Kyle “strutted” toward me on stage. It was as terrifying as it was hilarious, I think we pulled it off pretty well though.

With that said, we sold and we sold high, second highest bid of the night to be exact. Flattering. Nick Eubanks (local SEO whiz and all-around cool dude) purchased our lot for a rather hefty sum of money for his girlfriend, Kira.

Kira and I planned a full-fledged shoot to spend time talking about location scouting, lighting, cameras, and even post production. (Kudos to one of my prettiest friends, Sarah Harley, for modeling for us).

You can see some of the photos we got of Sarah that day. If you think you have a skill or idea to be auctioned at Philly Give & Get, reach out to Lansie! She’s pretty cool and she laughs a lot. I would probably even trust her with my kids--if I had any.

Daughter of local photographer, a film student, avid Star Wars fan, and budding young fashion model, Katie Shea Walters sure has her hands full modeling, walking in events such as the recent “Philadelphia Fashion Week”, oh, and-as mentioned-she’s a film student.

Katie and I first got together in January of 2013 and have worked together a couple times since then. These images are from our very first shoot together. This was very much a run-and-gun style shoot as we ran around a Philadelphia area town called Manayunk and captured images in several different areas of town. This shoot was a stylized, fashion-influenced, environmental portrait shoot to get Katie some unique and fun pictures that she could add to her portfolio.

The light source in these images was a single light, a 400W head with a 39” Rotalux Deep Octa bank (one of my personal favorite lighting modifiers!)

Distinct Pleasure

Yasmine is an talented and beautiful young Egyptian/Moroccan/Turkish college student(/model) attending college right here in Eastern Pennsylvania. I had the distinct pleasure of working with her about 2 months ago shooting some general purpose portraits and was delighted with how they turned out!

There was a bit of rain in the forecast for the date we'd picked to setup the shoot, but decided to press on and make it happen rain or shine! Typically when a shoot gets cancelled due to the weather forecast, the weather man ends up being wrong and we get beautiful weather, it's only when we decide to ignore the forecast that the forecast stands true!
We ended up with a very cloudy sky that morning and there was a brisk breeze which occasionally cut through our location all the while we were shooting further enhancing the cool/damp early-autumn air and, in the end, combining to make beautiful shooting weather throughout our shoot. It worked out wonderfully and we got lots of very soft, wrapping light! Photographer's dream!

Clean Fashion Style with Nikki

I am preparing for a series I want to shoot over the course of the winter which was inspired by a specific type of advertising (It's a secret!). In my preparation I had a model come in and shoot with me as I nailed down some of the final lighting tweaks, hair and make up issues, as well as worked the post-shoot, post production workflow to ensure a consistency in the looks produced by the various shoots for the series. Nikki came out and shot with me and was absolutely great!

No Location, No Plans, Creativity At Its Finest

It’s a great change up to go out and have a fun morning or evening of photography without any idea of what you’re going to shoot until you get into a location, or a general area and wander until you find a location. I photographed Rachel a few weeks ago and we picked out her clothing and met on a street corner in the city and just wandered around taking as many photos as we liked until it was too dark to shoot.

Photography and Creative Control

What little plan I had going into this photo shoot was to just keep it simple and shoot some general purpose portraits of her. She didn’t have anything specific she needed other than general purpose head and full-length shots for a project she was working on and there was no strict set idea of what she had to have so that left plenty of room for creative liberty and control.

Camera, Lighting, and Technical Settings

Lighting was a Canon 580 EXII speedlite modified with Westcott’s amazing 28” Apollo portable (collapsing, umbrella style) softbox and a hand held reflector for a little fill as needed. Everything was shot using a 24-70mm lens and I believe I stayed between f4 and f8 all evening long.

Thanks Rach!

All things considered Rachel killed it, she was awesome and we got some great photos to show for it. Good times.

Natural Light Shooting

Penn University

A couple of weeks ago I photographed a student named Andrew Frechinella. He is attending Penn University in Philadelphia. I shot him on the UPenn campus in the University City district of Philadelphia. He’s wrapping up his very own PhD and was looking to try his hand at a bit of modeling.

I always love shooting in new locations, especially interesting new locations. The campus at Penn lacks no character, space, architecture, or visual interest of any kind. It’s a really great atmosphere. On campus has a certain look and feel, and only a few block from campus a very different look and feel, I love it! Versatility of location is always a major plus.

Wandering

We began the afternoon (very sunny afternoon) by wandering around outside of Penn first and explored some alleyways and streets and ventured onto the college grounds. Andrew was a rock-star, we took advantage of a construction site, empty café, and paparazzi’d a few random students (some of the best photos of the day, just kidding ;) ) and he killed it on campus, off campus, everywhere we went.

Production Shots

I really need to start taking some photos of myself taking photos… or rather have my assistant (typically my Uncle) handling a second camera and snapping some production shots so you can get a sneak peak, behind-the-scenes look at what I do. Maybe next time, there’s always (usually) a next time.

Technical Nonsense

Because of the insane sunlight (which is really not very good for great portrait photography) I stayed away from lighting anything with strobes or off-camera flash, instead I hung out with a pair of reflectors. A Westcott 6’ x 4’ reflector panel (Sunlight & Silver) as well as a smaller Silver & White 30” Lastolite reflector. In sunlight these things work like a charm and can light very well, put them in the hands of someone who can feather the light and make adjustments on the fly for you, and you’ve got a killer lighting setup; all with one measly little reflector (and one giant continuous light we call the sun).

I shot almost everything at f2.8 and around 1/200th of a second except when photographing into the sun; I adjusted for greater depth of field and stopped down to f8.0 and around 1/100th of a second for those shots. Throw in the reflector bouncing that intense sunlight back into the subject and you get great light. My ISO stayed at 100 all day.

I made a concerted effort to get away from shooting at a longer focal length this time around and stayed with my 50mm (nifty 50) and my 24-70mm f2.8. I miss the flat, compressed look of the telephoto but love the way it made me work using this lens and not having the 70-200mm to “fall back on”. Since that shoot, I’ve been using the 24-70mm a whole lot more. Objective. Completed.

Thanks!

A big shout out to Andrew for hanging around all afternoon with me and being totally cool with everything I asked him to do, job well done man! Also a shout out to my Uncle Chris for the excellent setup, reflector-holding, idea-bouncing, goodness; having an extra set of hands makes impractical or impossible shots practical and possible.